VW scandal makes me think of press performance claims

[Deleted member 16349]

The VW scandal is at first amazing to think that a large technically oriented company would develop and use technology to cheat on emission performance. Not just some mistake but outright and intentional fraudulent behaviour.

On second thought, after also reading comments about this situation on some internet sites I follow, I am getting a bit depressed by the fact that this kind of misrepresentation is going on all the time in many other fields. In politics, which is expected but in also the sciences and in the media. Now a days, it is very difficult to know what is true. Reading articles is of little help since most journalists are not able to understand the complicated issues or are actually promoting one side over the other and report biased views. Also journalist get some of their information from scientific studies that can also be biased and even fraudulent.

So how does this relate to the performance of presses. IMO the marketing claims of how well a press performs is not so close to reality as one might like. It is only a funny coincidence that many major press manufacturers and VW are German companies. Thank heavens that other press manufacturers from other countries also tend to make the same questionable performance claims.

The same goes with colour management technologies and colour related organizations.

It is impossible for the average person to judge. You need to have a deep understanding of a problem to be able to understand when others are talking BS. Many problems are too complicated, or the specific problems are not so difficult but are hidden.

I tend not to believe what I read. I don't trust others for knowledge without question. Of the little bit of knowledge I do know about, I tend to be able to see BS or potential BS when it is presented. But spending a lot of effort to gain a small bit of knowledge is not very efficient. Basically no one has time to do that. So we are all susceptible to being fooled. Who would have thought VW would do what they did? It was unthinkable but maybe it should be thinkable and one should understand that it is probably done all the time to get us to believe something is true, which isn't.

 

[gordo]

I don't think that vendors in this business specifically lie about their product capabilities/performance. They may be selective about what information they release, or use commonly used language/phrasing that may be misleading as Alwan did recently in their "Alwan Color Expertise partners with Xeikon Color Services for G7 Color Matching" and is typical in any descriptions of inkjet resolution.
Typically testimonials are used to make vendor claims (or validate them) even though the person may not be qualified to do so. But it gets the vendor off the hook ("Hey, we didn't say that!")

Unfortunately there is no objective, credible, 3rd party to test performance vs promises in this business.

Get your vendor promises in writing!

 

[Deleted member 16349]

I don't think that vendors in this business specifically lie about their product capabilities/performance. They may be selective about what information they release, or use commonly used language/phrasing that may be misleading as Alwan did recently in their "Alwan Color Expertise partners with Xeikon Color Services for G7 Color Matching" and is typical in any descriptions of inkjet resolution.
Typically testimonials are used to make vendor claims (or validate them) even though the person may not be qualified to do so. But it gets the vendor off the hook ("Hey, we didn't say that!")

Unfortunately there is no objective, credible, 3rd party to test performance vs promises in this business.

Get your vendor promises in writing!

You are too kind to the vendors and others who make claims or comments that are probably not true. That is because you
are an nice guy.

But BS is still BS even though there was no intension of misleading. That is what marketing departments do all the time. They probably don't want to actually know the details since then they might feel bad (probably not) about over stating the performance.

As an example, in the early G7 days, Don Hutcheson commented very frankly that G7 was not a guarantee of colour but was a method to calibrate. I can see some advantages of using G7 instead over using dot gain curves. As I understand, his initial use of his G7 method was not actually a colour management per se tool but was to help the non colour management approaches being used to be a little more predictive. He had commented in the early days that if the G7 method with those non colour management approaches were not good enough, then one should go to the ICC methods.

I have never heard or read any comments from Don Hutcheson that I would regard as misleading in any way. But the use of the G7 method has gained a life of its own. So printers are now supposed to do G7 and then ICC profiles? This makes little sense to me, since if one did a custom ICC profile, there would be no need to do G7 or dot gain curves. It would be just extra work that was not needed. None of the manipulations being used actually changes the way the press prints. They only rename the file data.

With press manufacturers, sales comments could be that set ups are very quick. So the press is purchased, installed and then the vendor technical support helps the printer for months or even years to get things working right or at least tries. Some issues might never get resolved but one will never see testimonials from printers that say they bought a crappy technology. They always say it is great and the vendor gave excellent support. Public comments from printers are marketing comments and not true descriptions of how things went.

The colour scientist suggest that one should use Lab values to control the press but they can't say how to do it. That is left up to the printer and maybe some other vendor with expensive technology that might also not work as expected.

It would be nice to have a consumer report for the printing industry.

 

[Dan Roll]

A company no longer in business touted their fountain solution to a major producer of food packaging as being 'FDA approved' for use in food packaging. I wasted several years trying to find someone at the FDA who knew anything about this (even going from office to office in person at the FDA for three days) before I was told catagoricaly the FDA did not, and had no plan to, regulate the use of fountain solution for food packaging, or anything else.
The customer didn't care when this was brought to their attention because they wanted to believe it was true. I guess the lesson is if you are going to lie, make sure it is something the listener wants to be true.